Tessa Warrington, Socialist Party membership organiser
Splashed across the pages of the Socialist each week is news from the four corners of the world’s working class. Dock workers striking across 22 countries against militarisation. French students taking to the streets in their hundreds of thousands protesting chronic classroom underfunding. The mass movement in Spain against corporate landlordism and student-led demonstrations in Serbia, which saw the ousting of right populist politicians and election of the Student List of candidates, general strikes in Spain and France. A storm is brewing across Europe.
In Britain, we carry reports of workers striking for the first time. Unions balloting for national action under pressure from their membership. The TUC discussing plans for a national demo against austerity. At the same time, students are organising to walk out of their schools, colleges and universities together on 20 November (N20) to ‘Fight for our futures, not their wars’. At each stage, Socialist Party members have been there, fighting in their unions and on campuses to advance the organisation, programme and ideas of struggle that workers and young people need. We link the fight for victories today to the necessity to struggle for socialist change.
At Socialism 2026 (14-15 November) the ideas we talk about in the pages of the Socialist will come to life through discussion and debate about what is urgently needed to kick this rotten, decaying system into the dustbin of history. Not a talking shop, but a plan of action rooted in a material understanding of the world. That too many missed meals have consequences. That the cancellation of surgeries due to NHS funding cuts has a human cost. That the piling up of pressures on the backs of the working class, as wages stagnate and wallets are squeezed, is becoming unbearable. That workers and young people have had enough and want to fight back!
What we fight for
The Socialist Party fights for a society where production is owned, democratically controlled and managed by the working class. Not because it’s a nice thought, but because workers are already the producers. We do all the work – build all the roads, clean all the toilets, deliver all the services – we just don’t get to make decisions over it. Instead, our labour is used to hyper-enrich a tiny few while we face war, climate change and economic insecurity.
The potential power the working class has when united in action is just now beginning to be felt. N20 and the movements across Europe are the mood music of the future. Even so, there is no straight path to transforming society. Without democratic organisation, mass movements don’t have organs to discuss and decide a programme of demands and action together.
Trade unions organise millions of workers in Britain. We argue for these mass workers’ organisations to put up a political challenge to the Tories, Labour and all the capitalists’ parties at the ballot box, and to form a mass party of the working class.
It’s clear working-class and young people are grasping for a political voice, a response to the conditions created by capitalism. We can hasten that process by putting forward a clear, fighting plan of what is needed and how it can be achieved. In the trade unions, and in the process of the working class creating new democratic organisations and parties of struggle, the Socialist Party engages clearly putting forward the programme needed for the socialist transformation of society.
Come and participate in discussion with us at Socialism 2026 and take action alongside us on 20 November. If you are convinced by the ideas you read in this paper and see the need to get organised to fight for socialism, then come to the Socialism 2026 recruitment sessions on Saturday and Sunday. Join a party of working-class people with a proven history of leading mass struggles and winning for workers, such as to defeat Thatcher’s poll tax in the late 1980s/early 1990s and the battles leading Liverpool’s socialist council in the 1980s.
The reports and articles in the Socialist show an organisation full of serious and fighting members. We are ordinary people taking up the challenge of fighting for revolutionary change; for ourselves and our class, together. Join us in that struggle.
